Some faculty members or administrators are unfamiliar with Open Access. If an open-access policy is under discussion on your campus, or you are involved in beginning such a discussion, it is essential that you provide such individuals with timely, accurate information about the reasons for adopting an open-access policy, and the mechanics for how such a policy would operate in connection with faculty publishing practices. In some cases, misconceptions about the meaning of Open Access or misunderstandings about how an open-access policy would operate have led campus discussions astray.
If you are a faculty member, librarian, administrator or other person interested in a campus policy, and discussions about Open Access to faculty scholarship on your campus have begun, or are soon to begin, please let SPARC help.
SPARC offers two types of resources to facilitate campus policy discussions based on the facts about Open Access, including the facts about copyright law and about the compatibility between Open Access and journal sustainability. First, please find below a guide to implementing a campus open-access policy; videos from the SPARC-ACRL forum on the Harvard policy; and background on the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences policy, the first in which U.S. faculty voted unanimously for Open Access to be made the default.
Also available by request are two documents drawn from the experiences of those who have successfully spearheaded efforts to gain adoption of an institutional open-access policy. These include: "Campus open-access policy 'Choice Points'," which touch on all available options in developing a policy, along with recommended steps; and "Responses to common misconceptions about campus open-access policies." Please contact SPARC, via Stacie Lemick at stacie [at] arl [dot] org, to request access to these documents.
SPARC also is pleased to coordinate the work of a group of expert advisers who have experience with the process of gaining faculty acceptance for a campus open-access policy and who stand by to answer questions that remain after you have examined these tools. Please contact SPARC, via Heather Joseph at heather [at] arl [dot] org, to be put in touch with the advisory group.